The issues of control and whether the file abstraction is that good are orthogonal. I personally hold the view that it could have been better and that a more g

The issues of control and whether the file abstraction is that good are orthogonal. I personally hold the view that it could have been better and that a more general notion of persistent object (not in the OOP sense) would've been better from a user facing pov. The filesystem is doing more than one job, holding multiple responsibilities and imposing a way to present data and how to store it.